This question is with regards to a single server -> multiple clients udp-based game.

The java nio Datagram Channel and its "connect" ability seems pretty useful for speeding up a server by giving using a datagram channel to talk to each client. The documentation says connecting a channel will let us "avoid the overhead of the security checks". A downside, however, stems from people generally playing games from behind a router which hides their computer from internet traffic. Fortunately, operating systems will often make a temporary firewall rule on the router that will allow traffic to return from a recent packet destination. So, by sending a packet to the server IP + Port, we can get return traffic from that exactly server IP + Port. If I bind a port on the server for each client, the client doesn't know what port it is going to be provisioned / send that initial packet to, so it can't receive packets from the server.

One solution would be to have a separate TCP connection to the server, in which the client requests the connection and gets back the port number it will be using, and then can send a packet to that port to open the firewall.

The other is just to bind one port on the server, and use that to talk to each client.

So my question is this: Just how much does the "connected" datagram channel benefit? Is it really a significant speed difference? For my application, I'm not exactly sending a lot of data (66 tick, < 512 bytes per packet)

The other question: Is there a better way to let the client know what port it is going to be provisioned than spinning up an auxiliary connection with a pre-designated port to let the client know where it'll be?

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